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Monday, 15 February 2016

Is this how belief works?

While reading the Bible and the Koran to prepare for my series of posts I got to thinking about why do people believe the stuff in these holy books? After all, there are clearly so many flawed arguments or false statements in these mythology texts. So with some of these questions I went to a few religious people I know and asked them why the believe what I consider to be definite errors. The way I see the general result is rather interesting and so I decided to share it with my readers.

But to understand the theists position, first try understand mine and see if it is reasonable. When I look at either text, I expect said text to be self contained, coherent and completely true. For example, I do not expect to see any contradictory statements.I expect stories to be the same, and most importantly I expect these stories to reflect history accurately. Now, maybe I am expecting to much, but to me this seems completely reasonable and in fact to many believers my demands are reasonable.

So, why do they believe?

In a nutshell, theists do not see the contradictions, as simply put non-believers do not understand the finer nuances of what is actually been said. So to them there are no contradictory statements. When different stories are getting told for the same event, all that is happening is that the text is just filling in some gaps from another perspective. As such the texts are completely coherent. Lastly, if the history in the text is out of tune with real archaeological finds then simply put the archaeology is wrong. After all the holy text cannot be wrong, and in time we will find out that we were wrong with the archaeology. As such, the holy texts are historically prefect.

In this way all my demands for a self contained, coherent and completely true text are met. But the hoops you have to jump through take more imagination than I could ever muster.